They found extra blankets, and piled covers on until the pair of them were pressed flat as hoe-cakes. It’s the way he’d slept as a boy in Mississippi, beneath the heavy homemade quilts of his Grandpa Howard’s country house bed.
‘Wonderful dinner,’ she murmured. ‘Lovely people. Great pillows.’
‘Happy?’ he asked.
‘Happy.’
They lay facing each other in the light from a candle in the chamber stick.
‘You’re trembling,’ he said. ‘Shall I close the window?’
‘No, I’m just excited by it all. I’m glad it took so many years for us to get here.’
‘You’re glad?’
‘That it was long delayed and hoped for makes it all more precious. I love Broughadoon, it’s just right for us.’
He felt the blood beating in his temples; blood removed to America by his ancestors in 1858, and now returned. ‘What would you like to have from this trip?’
‘Time to enjoy being in my skin. There’s something by Thomas à Kempis: “Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a book.” I want to sleep in tomorrow-sit in that lovely old chair in the corner and read, and listen to the sounds of this place, and speculate.’
He was not keen on her speculations; they led to rearranging rooms, writing and illustrating books, painting kitchens and hallways, having fifteen yards of topsoil hauled in.
In the distance, the bleating of a sheep. Rain rustled in the downspouts.
‘One of the poems is coming,’ she said.
One of the Yeats poems she had worked for weeks to memorize and which he hadn’t yet heard.
‘It must be recited,’ she said, ‘or it might go away.’
‘You don’t want to wait for a bench in the garden or a stroll along the lough?’
‘Are you too worn to hear it?’
‘Never. Count me never too worn.’
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread,
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
He lay looking at her in the sheen of candlelight, realizing again that he was fond of the lines at the corners of her mouth.
‘Moth-like stars,’ he said. ‘Yes, go on.’
When I had laid it on the floor
I turned to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name.
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
She had worked hard to memorize poems by the Dublin-born poet besotted with Sligo, had used them as a litmus test for the memory that sometimes failed and left her anxious. ‘We all lose thoughts and words,’ he told her. ‘I can never remember romaine when I’m thinking of lettuce.’ It was a paltry confession; she deserved better. Did he often think of lettuce? she had asked.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands,
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
He lay quiet for a time, moved by the words and the way she delivered them, as if she lived in them and had opened a door and invited him in.
The trembling was running out of her like a tide.
‘Glimmering girl,’ he said, brushing her cheek with his fingers. ‘Brightening air. Thank you. Well done.’
He kissed her.
‘Very well done.’
‘He wrote it for a woman he was mad about, but she married someone else.’
He recalled the briefest image of the tall, polished Andrew Gregory on Cynthia’s porch, ringing the doorbell like a schoolboy lover. He had thought Tim Kavanagh’s number was up-but no, she had preferred the short and balding country parson.
Again, the distant bleating. He got up and closed the window, snuffed the candle flame with his fingers, and got back into bed.
‘So amazing,’ she said. ‘Open windows with no screens.’
‘No bugs.’ They were pretty buggy back in Carolina. ‘Coffee or tea in the morning?’ Liam said the first pot would be brewed at seven; breakfast from eight ’til ten.
‘Coffee. Thank you. I love you.’
‘I love you back,’ he said, quoting the thrown-away boy he’d been blessed to raise from age eleven. ‘And I don’t want to hear another word about your memory going south.’
‘What’s a Dub?’ she asked.
‘Someone from Dublin.’
‘What’s a Terp?’
‘The Terps are the University of Maryland’s football team.’
‘I’m destroyed by these pillows entirely,’ she crooned. She turned away, then, and backed up to him, assuming what his grandmother called ‘the spooning position.’ ‘I’ll just be backin’ oop.’
She would try on the Irish accent ’til kingdom come. He buried his face in her hair, in the smell of it. ‘I have a poem.’
‘You’re the sly one.’
‘This is something we’ve both known for a long time. To you before the close of day…’
‘Yes. Good.’
‘Creator of the world, we pray…’
She recited with him the verses of the old hymn, the one they sometimes prayed together at night:
From all ill dreams defend our sight,
From fears and terrors of the night…
Her slight, whiffling snore, then, and the faint chiming of a clock somewhere down the hall.
He lay unmoving, sensing fields rolling beyond the window like a green sea, opening out to his memory of Ben Bulben’s shadowed hulk, the ragged etch of Classiebawn against a lowering sky, the road winding along the coast of Connemara.
The Hunger Road, they called it; he wanted more than anything to show it to her. The sight of the road itself, however, had not been as galvanizing as the photograph on a postcard among the papers in his father’s locked desk.
As a boy, he’d been careful to know when the lock was off, and had gone at once to the photographs, to read the faces and try to imagine something of the line down which his blood flowed.
The shot of the road had been taken roughly a century after the 1840s when emigration numbers were at their highest. The road was empty of people or cars, curving along a bleak winter coastline where mountains jutted abruptly from the sea. Tens of thousands had walked this road to ships they believed would carry them from a hell of loss and betrayal to America and Canada and Australia and freedom. For many, that was true. For nearly as many, the vessels became known as coffin ships in which countless numbers of Irish perished in the crossing or sank with their boats while scarcely out of view from shore. And the worst wasn’t over-in ports where officials refused to allow debarkation, typhoid took its toll in ‘many a foul steerage.’ A labored paragraph on the back of the postcard had told him this.
There was no one whom he could ask why, or how it had happened; his father never mentioned his Irish heritage, nor did his grandfather, who, to his death, expressed a strange and often embarrassing inflection in his southern speech. Ireland was off limits, big time; Tim Kavanagh’s lineage was a myth not to be examined.
At some point, he stopped looking at the picture on the card, and looked only at the images of strangers wearing odd clothing-one fellow with his trousers rolled above his knees, standing proudly with a cow outside a thatched cottage; another wearing a rough-cut suit in front of a limestone church and cemetery; two boys playing in a walled garden, and a cat curled on a crooked bench; a woman with dark hair and sorrowful eyes, very beautiful; a man with a large mustache overlooked by a large nose.
He took his watch from the night table and squinted at the illuminated face. Ten-thirty. It was five-thirty in the afternoon in Mitford. He ran the figures in his head-an hour to the Hickory airport in Puny’s station wagon, with their luggage and her double set of twins; an hour’s wait with a two-day-old copy of The Charlotte Observer; roughly a two-hour flight to Atlanta in a plane the size of his carry-on; in Atlanta, a two-hour wait and a seven-hour delay; then seven and a half hours to Dublin with a two-hour wait before boarding an hour’s hop to Sligo, followed by a half-hour in baggage claim and the dicey trek with Aengus Malone.
Roughly twenty-five hours in motion, and no sleep to speak of. He was wrecked, but not ruined-with a few good hours tonight, he could easily get in sync with the time difference.
He was not a man to part easily from home, from his dog, from his now legally adopted son, Dooley, who was twenty-one going on forty-five. Such things need watchful tending, like a cook fire. One mustn’t go long away from connections lest something fragile die out. One could not fetch that particular fire from neighbors.
He’d noticed that she was carrying a couple of sketchbooks in the red handbag as big as a Buick. Why was he surprised? She was an artist, he should expect her to carry sketchbooks. While rummaging for a granola bar in the depths of that mess kit, she had set the watercolor box on the seat beside her, innocent of his stares.
So. Sketchbooks and watercolors. Just in case, of course.
Last week, she showed him the e-mail from her editor, James, in which she was exhorted to ‘get a book out of Ireland.’
She hit reply. ‘James-the only thing I intend to get out of Ireland is pleasure. Your devoted author.’ She handed over the printed declaration. ‘There, darling,’ she said, ‘remove that worried look from your face.’
Such intentions were all well and good, but books had a tendency to pop out of her like a jack from a box. He had never liked jacks-in-the-box.
Out of the blue, the mania would take hold, and for months following she would be cut in twain: half for him, half for the book. She gave it all the tenderness and passion of a mother toward a child, and at times all the brooding of a woman toward a lover. She would be there and not there, all at once-the way he had been, perhaps, during so many seasons of his priesthood. There and not there, all at once.
‘Fire and ice,’ someone had said of him in the days when he was searching for God and trying to make up the emptiness. And even when, into his forties, he had at last been found of God, it was the very same, except then he was absorbed utterly in the telling of the truth and sparing nothing, least of all himself.
He didn’t want her committing her soul to another book, not now. He didn’t want to be on this trip alone, though at her side daily. After more than sixty years of bachelorhood, he had discovered a terrible truth:
Without her, he was beached.
He scooped her closer to his chest and belly and into the curve of his bent knees.
Silver apples of the moon, golden apples of the sun.
Together with the sound of her light snore, the rain dripping from the leaves was his cradle song.